Amazon.com gobbling up Goodreads

E-commerce giant to expand peer-review engine for books

E-commerce giant Amazon.com is swallowing up San Francisco's Goodreads. But the San Francisco social network and peer recommendation engine for books says its users shouldn't worry that things will change too much very soon.

Otis Chandler, Goodreads' co-founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview Thursday that one of the primary goals of integrating into Amazon will be building out the recommendation and social features of the site - where users can see what their friends are reading, whether that friend likes the book, and then buy the book - for customers of the Kindle e-reader.

But he says in the near term, there shouldn't be any significant changes to the actual Goodreads product. Goodreads and Amazon, which announced the planned acquisition Thursday, have not yet figured out how they'll sync up users' accounts, because many will have them with both Amazon and Goodreads already.

Intriguing for Amazon

Like other social networks, Goodreads keeps users within its own ecosystem because of their social connections to friends. For Amazon, this is intriguing because when users finally decide they want to buy a book, Amazon wants to make sure it's from its store.

And, under the hood, so to speak, Amazon can analyze what Goodreads users are doing and learn more about the products it sells.

As of last year, Goodreads, founded in 2007, had drawn almost 10 million readers and was attracting 20 million visits a month. Chandler, who runs the company with his wife, Elizabeth, is a scion of the famed Los Angeles newspaper publishing family. But the software engineer-turned-entrepreneur has made online publishing his specialty.

Though "social" has become something of a buzzword, Russ Grandinetti, Amazon vice president for content on the Kindle, says Goodreads won't be Amazon's introduction to user interaction. Amazon has had user reviews on its site, for instance, almost since its launch.

Apple, a competitor with Amazon in the market for digital books and media, has long been criticized for having little if no "social" component to its products, relying on a basic rating system.

Partnership renewed

Amazon doesn't discuss features until they're released, so Grandinetti wouldn't comment on how Goodreads might show up on the Amazon Web experience.

The purchase will renew a partnership Goodreads and Amazon had until last year. Amazon had been providing Goodreads information about the books users were discussing through its application program interface, but Goodreads didn't like that Amazon required it to link back only to Amazon's Web pages.

So Goodreads decided to switch to Ingram, another large publishing platform, so it could link to third-party online stores more freely.

Chandler didn't give a timetable, but now that Goodreads is going to be part of the Amazon team, that partnership will soon switch back.